In her April 6, 2018, New Yorker essay, “What About ‘The Breakfast Club’?,” Molly Ringwald revisits the 1985 film after watching it with her daughter. She remains proud of parts of the movie and understands why it mattered to teenagers, but argues that affection for it should not require overlooking the way it treats her character, Claire.
Why Ringwald returned to the film
A restored Criterion Collection edition released in 2018 prompted Ringwald to join an interview with others connected to the production. Her essay also draws on an earlier viewing of the film with her ten-year-old daughter. Those encounters led her to reconsider a movie she had known from the inside, this time with the sexual politics of the #MeToo era in view. Read Ringwald’s essay in The New Yorker.
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The scene that changed how she saw Claire’s story
Ringwald focuses on the scene in which Bender hides beneath the table where Claire is sitting. She writes that he peeks under Claire’s skirt and that the film implies inappropriate touching, although the audience does not see it. Ringwald says she did not explain that implication to her daughter during their viewing, but the moment stayed with her.
In her essay, Ringwald characterizes Bender’s behavior toward Claire across the film as sexual harassment. The issue, in her reading, is not only one unsettling moment; it is how the movie presents his treatment of Claire within their relationship. The Guardian’s contemporaneous account likewise identifies Claire’s treatment as the part Ringwald found most troubling. The Guardian’s report on Ringwald’s essay.
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Her response is criticism, not a rejection of the film
Ringwald does not say that she has stopped valuing the film or John Hughes’s work. She writes that she loves parts of his films and remains proud of them in many ways. At the same time, she says embracing them without acknowledging their troubling elements feels hypocritical.
That tension matters because she also recognizes the emotional importance these films held for young viewers, including people who felt isolated or outside the usual high-school social order. Ringwald’s point is not that a work’s value cancels its harm, or that its failings erase every meaningful connection viewers found in it. She asks, “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?”
Remembering the past without excusing it
For Ringwald, revisiting the film means allowing both memory and change. She argues that erasing history is dangerous, but that remembering a work’s transgressions is part of measuring how far culture has changed—and where it still falls short. In the essay, she writes: “change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.”
The practical result is a more complicated kind of appreciation: viewers can acknowledge what a film meant to them while discussing what it depicts and whose experience it minimizes. Ringwald’s essay leaves that conversation open rather than offering nostalgia or condemnation as the only acceptable response. Writer Jenny Han called the essay “a pretty tender, fair-minded piece,” as reported by The Guardian.
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What the essay establishes—and what it does not
Ringwald refers to a study about the ratio of girl to boy characters in top-grossing family films, but the essay passage does not identify the study’s publisher, title, or year. That figure should not be repeated as a verified statistic without identifying its original source. Her central case about The Breakfast Club rests instead on her own account of the film and her interpretation of Claire’s treatment.
Ringwald also mentions the 2018 restored Criterion Collection edition as part of the circumstances that brought her back to the film. The essay does not establish current edition formats, availability, or viewing options.
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